MPH: Franco Colapinto exposes how F2 is failing young stars

Within the space of three or four races Franco Colapinto has made the prospect of him not being on the F1 grid next year seem ridiculous. He’s taken the opportunity provided him by Williams and absolutely wrung its neck. It’s an opportunity which looked unlikely until he began to make it happen with his performance in FP1 at Silverstone where he was impressive in his boldness, the confidence he immediately displayed in the fast corners. This from an F2 rookie whose season in that category was looking ok, but nothing special. As Logan Sargeant slid progressively backwards, clearly suffering a confidence crisis and making no inroads at all on the deficit to team-mate Alex Albon – and crashing into the bargain – so it was a case of ‘why not’ try the team’s rookie third driver for the last third of the season. And the revelation unfolded.

Together with the sparkling return of Liam Lawson last weekend and the brilliant cameo performances from Oliver Bearman at Ferrari and Haas, it underlines in bold that you cannot take junior category performances as the ultimate barometer of potential. Even in a spec formula, the difference in machinery between a well-engineered car and a struggling apparently identical one can be way bigger than the differences between their drivers. This has long been the case but has been exaggerated in the current era by the severe lack of running imposed (for reasons of cost) and the traits of the tyres upon which they run, which are good for one properly fast lap.

In F2 and F3 testing is virtually zero, your running is restricted to the official sessions of the race weekend – and you have only a very limited supply of tyres in which to experiment with set up and technique. These limitations have all been imposed for reasons of cost, yet the required budgets are massively bigger than when there was competition between chassis manufacturers, engine preparers and tyre suppliers – and as much testing as you wished. Even accounting for inflation.

This is because these ‘ladder to F1’ championships have been made a commercial profit centre under one F1-approved organiser and structured to make a big profit. As part of the F1 circus, the championship organiser sets a major part of the teams’ budgets by way of the championship registration fees, race entry fees, the compulsory use of the organisers’ contracted fuel supplier, caterers, etc. Then there are the spares costs from the contracted chassis supplier. The teams are a captive market and have to pass these costs on. These costs are such that they dwarf what was spent in a previous era on testing and a lot of people are making a lot of money from them.